tech blog 46 items | updated Apr 5 2010

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Visit my article page for links and to read the wide range of community comments! A polarizing service indeed.

I don't really need to explain this first video, but I do want to say that General Larry Platt is a wonderful, wonderful man.



Secondly, the Internet is made of cats, if you didn't already know. Cats, cats, cats, catscats.



Enjoy, my friends. Enjoy.

I've never really been one of those people who needs to see the big new summer blockbuster on opening night. In fact, I prefer to wait a couple weeks for the crowd to die down and to let the movie reviews flood in before I bother. It's just less of a hassle overall, because who needs a hassle? I don't, that's who. And for the most part I take the same approach when it comes to technology. I don't need FIRST! bragging rights, in fact, I prefer that you deal with the alpha/beta/gamma/delta bugs and I'll jump on the bandwagon once I know the iWhatever.com is worth my time. There are exceptions of course, but in general I prefer the path of least hassle whenever possible. Besides, so many of you are willing to do the heavy lifting for me! Thanks!

So big to-dos like CES are kind of like a nightmare to me, because they're so scrambling and pushy and desperate and full of FIRST! type folks. Huge showroom floors with mood lighting and too much bass on the speakers, the rows and rows and rows of booths and all those awful matching polo shirts the company spokespeople wear, the nervous PR girls who all look exactly the same with their sensible/sexy attire, the COLORFULLY CLEVER BUSINESS CARDS! Last time I was at CES I got lost in row G4500thousandmillion and couldn't find an exit, not even kidding. All I wanted was to see the sun and I thought I was going to die in Vegas under a stack of plasmas and USB drives and smiley booth babes.

Also, the Vegas part.

This year, half of everyone I know is at CES and I'm comfortably not, but they're telling me everything I need to see/hear/ponder in real-time via Twitter and TWiT Live and relentless blog coverage and claustrophobia-inducing photos and what exactly am I missing? Nothing except the stuff not worth talking about, of which there is tons and tons, and sucks valuable time out of any CES schedule and makes everyone's feet hurt just a little more at the end of the day.

I know this sounds like sour apple stuff, like I secretly wish I were there and this is my way of trying to convince you that I'm not, but seriously... I'm not there and I'm glad. Now pardon me while I go back to manually refreshing my Twitter homepage every 37 seconds to make sure don't miss an update about how later this year I'm going to be watching the World Cup in 3-D in my own living room.

My god, when did I turn into Om Malik?

First there was formspring.me that popped up out of nowhere onto my radar, now two seconds later there's a new integrated Tumblr feature that does the same thing, only better. I'd love to know the back story on this one, cause I bet somebody behind the scenes is PISSED.

The always easily offended Tumblr community is already up in arms about this new feature, threatening unfollows left and right. I guess it's become some people don't like the idea of other people being able to ask yet other people questions anonymously? Because nobody's ever been able to do that via message boards and blog comments for the past 10 years?

I kinda like it, and even though if I were Formspring I'd cut a bitch over this, as an already enthusiastic Tumblr user I prefer the built-in functionality over Formspring's external (and buggy as all hell in both Firefox and Chrome) interface. Bring on the questions, Internet. We can handle it. Until somebody starts crying.

There's so much funny stuff I run across out in the frozen web tundra every day, but I usually don't feature it here because... well... it's not exactly technically helpful. Well my friends, that all changes today with the introduction of a proud new segment entitled "Haha Web". No, I'm not kidding. Why are you looking at me like that?



The future of "Haha Web" depends entirely on you and whether you think it's worthwhile (obvs) or a waste of time (get a sense of humor!). But seriously, let me know what you think either way. Everything I do, I do it for you. And Bryan Adams. But mostly you.

I just read through Engadget's "Ten gadgets that defined the decade" post, which is very well-written and thorough, and I was with them all the way from the Canon Digital ELPH (oh right! that was huge!) to Windows XP (my god, that was THIS decade, wasn't it), through the PalmOne Treo 600 (which I never owned, but I can appreciate what it did for mobile computing). Until the tenth gadget, that is - something called an ASUS Eee PC 900 that was released in 2008?

From Engadget:

Where the Eee PC 701 and its Xandros Linux OS was aimed at kids and "housewives" (seriously, an ASUS representative said that at the time), the succeeding Eee PC 900 was the realization that netbooks had wider market appeal when preloaded with Windows XP. Whether it was business-minded folk or just those looking to connect to the web on-the-go on a device larger than a smartphone, the small and very affordable laptop made a lot more sense than anyone ever could have imagined. The 900 series was officially launched in April 2008 and though Intel's future Atom platform was still being developed by those silicon "rockstars" at Intel, the 2.2-pound mini-notebook had an 8.9-inch display, Intel Celeron M processor and 12GB of flash storage (an odd pairing of one 4 GB SSD and one 8 GB SSD). ASUS sold more than a million units in the first couple of months which resulted in global shortages of the liliputian laptops. In the U.S. the 900 was the first netbook to be sold at Best Buy. Shortly after the 900's worldwide success and the release of Intel's Atom CPU, all major laptop manufactures brought netbooks to market with 9 or 10 inch displays.

Uh, what? Where've I been? This was last year?

Also? I couldn't even tell you how to pronounce that horrible name. Do you say "E-E-E", or just "eee"? So confused. I mean, I get that the point is that this was the first netbook that spawned a new era of smaller laptops, but still. A gadget that defined the decade and I'm coming up with nothing. I feel dumb.

Oh, shut up. You can't tell me those topless dudes aren't funny.

Cute Boys With Cats (because there is a serious shortage of pictures of cute boys with cats). HA HA HA!

I defy you to disagree with my choices!! Just kidding... these are my top 5, but I'd like to know what yours are as well. And yes, I know that a cell phone is more of a gadget than a service, but I felt it applied.



My full story lives here on Current Tech.

I'd love to know what you all think about this idea. Wonderful? Flawed? Better yet, is anyone using it yet? I don't know anyone who is or I'd have asked them.

My full story and links are here on current.com/tech.

Yesterday one of my favorite Internet video-centric blogs, NewTeeVee, alerted me to the fact that my video upload site of choice, Vimeo, is being sued by Capitol Records for copyright infringement over one of its most popular user memes, the "lip dub", a video of one or more persons lip synching to a (usually well-known) copyrighted song track.
From NewTeeVee:

The complaint states that Vimeo “induces and encourages its users to upload…audiovisual works,” which it then disseminates virally throughout the Internet. According to Capitol Records, the company’s staff actively participates in “making, selecting, commenting on, and at times choosing to delete” audiovisual works, including those featuring its own copyrighted recordings.

Now, here's the thing. It would be easy to dismiss Capitol Records as the bad guys who don't have senses of humor and just want to make trouble for creative folks. And I've actually made one of these lip dubs during work hours while drinking alcohol at at previous place of employment, so I'm obviously a fan of the process (and a shameless ham, which is neither here nor there, but let's be honest, I don't completely suck at lip dubs).

But I also completely understand why Vimeo's being sued, and I'm not sure they've got a real strong counter argument for Capitol Records. The day a bunch of co-workers and I made the lip dub I referenced above, we sort of put it together on the fly on a Friday afternoon and showed off the final product at an all-hands meeting afterward. And even though everybody laughed and clapped, my boss was a little freaked because it was obviously shot in the company studio and we obviously didn't have permission from INXS to use their song. And it kind of became this dramatic issue where he really didn't want our lip dub video getting posted anywhere associated with the company, even though we'd planned to use it as a fun promotional piece and get as many people to watch as possible (I hadn't run any of it by him beforehand). And of course I guffawed at his paranoia and considered him humorless and argued that he was just trying to keep the creative folks from having fun, but deep down I knew he was right. So I posted the video to my personal account on Vimeo and agreed to accept any repercussions individually. And there weren't any, and I never really thought about it again.

Except that now there are repercussions, at least for Vimeo. And I'm not quite sure what to think about being part of a pretty big group of people who may not fall under the "parody" defense. So....what's your opinion?

I'm back in the Current offices after a little over a week in Paris partly for work (Le Web) and partly for play (can you blame me?).

Beautiful city aside (and as far as cities go, I just don't think it gets better than Paris, I really don't), a reoccurring conversation I had with people actually working in the tech sector in Paris is that Paris just isn't a great tech hub. Which surprises me, since being a large metropolitan city I'd just have assumed there would be more of a community there. On the surface it didn't seem otherwise... I observed as many iPhones, wifi-enabled cafes, and general modern goings on that I do here at home in San Francisco, and I certainly felt among "my people" while attending the Le Web conference, one of the largest tech conferences in the world.

Still, I kept meeting Parisian developers/bloggers/etc. at various tech-oriented meetups last week who'd explain how difficult it is to live in Paris and still feel part of the overall energy of the Internet crowd. Which is disappointing to me, because I'd like to have believed that with all the tools available to us just a few short weeks from 2010, it matters less than ever where you physically reside, and more how participatory you are online. What if I want to move to London someday? Or Delhi? Tokyo? Am I going to feel out of the loop of insider-y Silicon Valley?

I do happen to live in San Francisco, so maybe I'm just extra naive about how the rest of the world feels about where all the action is. And don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that amazing ideas are coming from all ends of the Earth on a regular basis and am certainly not suggesting otherwise. It was just slightly heartbreaking to be in a world-class city like Paris and keeping hearing about the lack of a tech community. PARIS!?

So, where do you fall in this debate? Does my experience sound familiar to you? Do you live somewhere that feels squarely outside this silly bubble? Or was I just talking to the wrong people? Weigh in and school me, because I really am curious.

One more thing- my jet lag is at an all-time high, so please forgive any spelling/grammatical inconsistencies in this post. I no longer trust myself to make sense.

Twitter's been rolling out its new Retweets functionality to users in batches, but pretty much everybody has the upgraded features by now. Seems like most people HATE how retweets work. Me? I just think it complicates everything again. Remember when Twitter turned off the ability to see your friends' replies to people you weren't following in your timeline without asking anyone and a bunch of people (including myself) got all bent out of shape about not being part of the decision-making process? Well, after about a week the consensus was that timelines were a lot cleaner overall and everybody sort of got over it.

My timeline is totally out of control again with all these stupid retweets. Ok fine, sometimes I'm like "hey that's kinda cool, I'm glad it got brought to my attention" but more often I'm like "ugh, that's do dumb, why would he retweet that?" I realize that I can choose to "hide" particular people's retweets (notice how @scobleizer always retweets @scoblemedia? KILL ME, KILL ME NOW, SWIFTLY), but that's still a lot of manual work on my end. I understand that Twitter's grown so much that there's a need to keep some order in the system, but I'm already missing the simplicity of it all.

Oh yeah, and then there's this. Sigh. I don't know what's happening, and quite honestly I don't really care.

I've decided to embark on the experiment of disabling most of my social network sync/forwarding/cross-post settings and just funneling everything through Posterous. The main idea is to create a single pipeline through which all content is routed, and Posterous is a great service to do so, as long as you're comfortable giving that service a lot of power.

Several heavy social network using friends have recommended Posterous to me already, but I've always felt turned off by the email part. I know email's convenient and ubiquitous and for the most part accepted by the entire world, but it's my least favorite place to hang out these days (ok, my voicemail inbox is worse, but barely). I pretty much hate checking my Gmail... a wasteland of starred items that I starred to remind myself to come back to, but never did, and now they make me feel bad about myself every time I log in.

But I digress. Using Posterous isn't about hanging out in my inbox, it's simply about using the email protocol to post pretty much anything to anywhere: text, photos, videos, etc., to blogs, Facebook profiles/pages, Twitter, etc. I can access my email with my computer or my mobile phone, and I always have one or both of them on me at all times. The service is a lot more robust than how I'm explaining it, so if you're befuddled I recommend you read the Posterous FAQ for a very thorough walk-through.

Essentially I'm disabling cross-posting Del.icio.us links to Tumblr, blip.fm posts to Friendfeed, Flickr photos to Facebook, Facebook status updates to OMG I CAN'T KEEP TRACK OF ALL MY CROSS-POSTING ANYMORE, DID IT ORIGINATE IN MY LAST.FM SETTINGS OR MY TWITTER OAUTH, I NEED TO START OVER. See? I've gone crazy. So I'm linking all my online accounts to Posterous only, and I'm going to use the Posterous email protocol to send my content exactly where I want. I like experiments! This will be fun!

Here's how it works:

• *I want to post a photo to Flickr: flickr@myaccount.posterous.com


• *I want to post the same photo to Flickr and Friendfeed: flickr+friendfeed@myaccount.posterous.com


• *I want to post the same piece of content to every service I've linked to Posterous: post@myaccount.posterous.com


• *I want to post something to my Posterous account, but not to any of my linked services: posterous@myaccount.posterous.com

And so on.

Now, because I really do belong to a ton of social networks that I use regularly, completely switching up my sharing methods is a little complicated, and I've already run into a few stumpers. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to share any little tricks I figure out along the way with all of you that 1) might already be baffling you, or 2) you may come across eventually if you decide to use Posterous the way I'm using it.

My first issue arose when I posted a Photo Booth pic from my computer to Flickr via Posterous email:



As you can see, the subject line of my email posted perfectly as my Flickr photo title, but notice how my Flickr "description" is some lame promotional Posterous code and not what I wrote in the body of that email (it was about my stylish pajama bottoms)? No hard feelings Posterous, I know that's how you're getting the word out and all, but... no thanks. I already wrote my own Flickr photo description in the body of the email I sent, and that's all I want to see.

How to fix it:

In your Flickr account advanced settings on Posterous, you see how Posterous auto-populates your Flickr photo's description with their own footer, which makes perfect sense. They're not hiding anything or being devious, and I was able to achieve what I wanted simply by replacing their default code with this:



Now, when I send an email to flickr@myaccount.posterous.com, whatever I post in the subject line will convert to my Flickr title, and whatever I post in the body of my email along with my attached photo will become my Flickr description! It will be as if I uploaded through Flickr directly. Nobody will know. Easy as pumpkin pie, right? (Obviously you can screw around with the codes to get your own desired effect).

More Posterous tips as I discover them along the path of my little experiment. If you use Posterous and have any tricks of your own, please share them with the rest of us. This effer took me all morning. ;)

I've gushed about my love of the beloved "tips to hack your life" website Lifehacker recently, but creator Gina Trapani is always giving me reasons to love her more, and not just because she runs a personal site called SmarterWare.

Here's the latest: I signed up for a Google Wave account way back when, and was one of those not-so-lucky-people-that-I-got-my-account-first, but still-pretty-lucky-and-way-before-almost-everyone-else-i-knew people. Problem was, I launched it a few times, got a little confused, got a little bored, got a little frustrated when something seemed unnecessary or oddly designed, and essentially abandoned the whole thing after some halfhearted settings reviews.

Back to why Gina (with help from Adam Pash) is awesome. She just wrote a complete Google Wave guide called "The Complete Guide to Google Wave" (shocking title, I can't believe it either) which is available to you, me, and everyone else, for free, on the great big Internet!
It's pretty much the most comprehensive, inclusive Google Wave-based piece of modern literature that I've seen, anyway. God, I'm glad they did all this so I don't have to.

It's worth noting their official "Buy the Book" policy:

"The preview edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave will be available for purchase as a DRM-free PDF in November of 2009. The first edition will debut in January as both a PDF and a softcover print book, with new editions to follow throughout 2010.

Keep an eye on this site, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our mailing list to find out when the book will be available for purchase. Read more about our grand experiment in quick, iterative, and independent technology publishing on our About page.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave is and will continue to be freely available to read online at completewaveguide.com."

Now, if that isn't an early gift under the tree, I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS, PEOPLE.

Yeah, just watch the video and you'll see what all my fuss is about.



The transcripts only get worse from there, btw. I used my own voice thinking somehow it would work more accurately? Yeeeeeah NO.

The link to my full story on current.com/tech is here.

Once you get done laughing at my misfortune, you might like to watch me create an award from thin air and present it to a deserving website. I DON'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP, PEOPLE.

Thanks for being you!



Here's the link to my full story on current.com/tech.

You can also subscribe to my Current Tech videos on iTunes!

Great idea, great service, great results! Now, how do I get an invite?



Here's the link to my full story on current.com/tech.

You can also subscribe to my Current Tech videos on iTunes!